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Halloween Short for 2014-A Forest of Choice

Every year I've had this blog, I have tried to include a Short piece for Halloween. Previously, it was a running joke that I submitted for a local newspaper's Halloween writing contest, one that I tried my best to write something elaborate and nuanced enough to avoid winning. This year, they cancelled the contest, so I took it upon myself to write the piece for my own (and hopefully, your) pleasure. It's called a Forest of Choice, and I barely managed to keep it to exactly 500 words. I wanted to try to write something that was a little larger than the 500 words on the page, and for my own purposes, I think I succeeded. I wanted to explore the paranoia of being lost in the woods, but I also wanted to explore the minutia of life, how the closer we look at it, the more questions we are left with. Call it anthropomorphism if you want, but I think it's a conversation worth having.

Anyways, before I go off on any more of a tangent, here's the piece. Let me know what you think?

A Forest of Choice

By: Christopher Godsoe

Word Count: 500

The storm rolled in, demarcating a
shift in tone as well as climate. It brought with it the cold, and
it's the cold wind that I feared most. It pushed around the branches
of the birch grove I spent the night in like a spectral composer, and
I shook.

I was lost, but if you asked me for how
long I had been lost, I couldn't tell you. One wrong turn, a poor
choice on the path, and everything I knew might as well be a thousand
miles away.

Neither could I tell you when the
voices started, but now they're my constant companion, telling me how
I'll never escape, how I will spend the rest of my days wandering
that same trackless expanse of wilderness. One choice, one solitary
decision to leave the trail had been my undoing. It's been said that
we are a product of our choices in life, and it's a point I can find
no fault in.

As I've walked, I've been thinking a
lot about choices. I wonder if our minds are simply a product of the
choices inside of our brains, the billions of individual connections
between neurons carrying the magic formula that makes us....us. Does
consciousness arise from the noise of a billion neural connections,
and we just lack the perspective to see it? I suppose it's possible.

But if a billion choices are the
genesis of consciousness, might any system of sufficient complexity
generate the same “spark”? Is perhaps the forest, with it's
billions of tree branch vocal cords, such a being? Aren't we both
nothing more than symbiotic clusters of lesser living things? You
might call that crazy talk, but if a crazy man shouts the secret of
life in an otherwise deserted forest, does he make a sound? Does a
forest, with it's bespoke consciousness, posses an intelligence
capable of whispering the horrible words that have followed me for
the past few days, simply by shaping the wind through the unique
pattern of branches, each fork in each branch a choice of the tree?

Or is it my mind, with nothing to do
but generate false phantoms? These are the things I think about, when
every survivalist tells you that I should be thinking of home,
cultivating hope that I will see everyone I love again. They're not
here, though. They don't hear the wind as it passes through those
branches, whispering in concert, speaking to me in a tongue that only
I can hear. Maybe the voices were always there, the lost language of
a forest grown furious by the indifference of man. Maybe you just
have to be quiet long enough to hear it's enmity.

Having listened to that incessant
lecture, of how soon I will become weak from famine, how my once sure
steps will begin to falter, it's a gift I wish to return.

I'm cold, rapidly depleting my pudgy
excess of stored calories, and soon there will be one less voice in
the forest.